


show me why you're strong

by placeless



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: M/M, Traveling, Wanderlust, all my writing is pretentious, it's so pretentious, why did I write this, why do i write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 01:45:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5849143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/placeless/pseuds/placeless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>wanderlust eats brendon whole</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending

brendon has a big poster of the world hanging on his wall. it’s old, cost two dollars at a flea market, and is peeling at the edges, but he loves it. he loves traveling like one might love coffee — an addiction, that might not be healthy, but nevertheless prevails.

he pushes thumbtacks into the places he wants to go, stares at the little countries, hopelessly hopes that one day he’ll be able to make it to all of them. but his mom pushes pamphlets in his face, reminding him of his future to come — missions, universities, wedding venues. _you don’t own your life,_ he’s reminded. _god does._

on his desk is a little jar filled with money. sometimes, when the family’s running low on money, his dad takes it from there. he doesn’t think brendon knows, but he does. everyday, he watches as his escape money sinks lower and lower.

all his relatives show up to his graduation. they pat him on the back, smiles as real as they can be. they think brendon is going to do what they’ve all dreamt of him doing — when he was born, they thought, _he’ll be good to us, help us; he’ll get money, a wife, a life._

brendon wants to confess. he wants to go to church and drop to his knees and scream for forgiveness at the top of his lungs, but nobody will hear him. his faith flies away like a lost kite in the wind, like a bottle down a stream with a message inside. it reads, _i’m holding onto a ledge and slipping. help me._

/

at eighteen, brendon still wears lavender hoodies and red glasses. he has a job now, lives on his own. the map is still hung on his wall, thumbtacks intact. as brendon nears closer and closer to nineteen, his dreams of traveling the world seem more and more unrealistic. he's a panhandler and his wishes are coins, slipping right through his fingers.

his parents call him daily, pulling him back to their house whenever they have the chance. they give him gifts, but when he opens them there’s only a bomb inside, ready to spit reality into his face.

he meets a girl with a nice smile named sarah. she talks about the world like it’s all a game, like nothing good will ever come. she insults a god that doesn’t exist and laughs afterwards, but brendon doesn’t have the heart to tell her how much that hurts him.

“we’re all pawns.” she leans back in her armchair. “i mean, there’s no point if we’re all going to die, right? why keep living? why not blow my brains out right here and now?”

brendon furrows his eyebrows. “well, if life’s a game, don’t you want to win?”

she looks at him a bit differently for the rest of the day.


	2. time is not alone with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> brendon realises some things & gets a birthday present

sometimes, late at night, he goes on midnight drives. he likes to feel the wind in his hair, whispering to him. it holds a melody that he can’t hear anywhere else, sings sweet lullabies to him. when he goes out on drives like these, he’s reminded of his youth, of when he was ten years old and running through the forest filled him with love and adrenaline and all the things he didn’t have. when his mom would scrub at his grass-stained jeans, telling him that he couldn’t do this forever. one day he would have to grow up.

brendon isn’t sure if he likes growing up.

/

sarah has ink black hair and a heart-shaped face and brendon thinks that if he liked girls, he would want her to be his wife. she fiddles with the straw in her drink and looks over at him. “you don’t like las vegas, do you, brendon?”

he blinks. “well, i… no, not really.”

“you want to leave.” she studies his face with soft eyes. “i can tell. it’s spelled blatantly on your face. if any of your relatives, your friends, cared enough they’d realise that.”

he falters. “but… i have a life here. i have people i need to please. i can’t just up and leave.”

sarah takes the straw out of the glass, twisting it in her fingers, watching as the soda drips onto the countertop. “your life doesn’t revolve around other people, brendon. you can’t always be the doormat. go do something. if not for yourself, for me. yeah?”

she stares at him for a few seconds. when she blinks, her lashes splay on her skin like veins on a wrist, leaving hints of mascara behind like blood. the chair she’s sitting on squeaks as it moves on the tile floor, and soon she’s gone, out the door, just like his past.

his life doesn’t belong to anyone else. his life belongs to him. as he walks back to his bedroom, he thinks, i can achieve great things.

/

april is dreary and so is his birthday. rain falls on his window like flower petals on an artist’s palette, soft and sweet. brendon gets multiple phone calls, multiple gifts, but none of them mean as much as a sunny day would.

sarah appears in the smoothie hut ten minutes before his lunch break, wearing a grin that matches her heart. she takes his hand and he says that he only has ten minutes left and that she can wait, but she shakes her head.

“i need to show you something,” she says, tugging on his hand. he follows her helplessly down the street, pushing through the tourists and broken celebrities, all the way to her apartment. he’s never been to it before, and when he steps inside he smells marijuana. he’s not surprised — for her entire life, sarah’s been high on something, whether it be the smell of daisies or rebellion or weed.

she brings him to the kitchen, where a small table sits. a pile of unopened mail lays on it, scattered together like a pile of leaves. she nods towards it. “go on.”

confused, he steps forward. as he sifts through the mail, he doesn’t recognise anything unusual. all of them are addressed to sarah orzechowksi, all from various people. he scrunches his eyebrow, wondering what the point of all of this is, when he realises one letter is addressed to brendon urie.

picking it up, he raises an eyebrow at sarah, but she just grins. he opens it carefully, making sure not to rip the paper, and takes out the contents.

he almost cries as he goes through the various papers. they’re not papers at all, really. they’re tickets. _paris, rome, london, stockholm, athens, tokyo, beijing, seoul…_

at the very bottom, there’s a small folded paper. he unfolds it slowly. it’s a map, with scribbled sharpie lines connecting different countries. at the bottom it reads, _where do you want to go?_

tears glisten in his eyes like stars in a constellation. “sarah,” he whispers. “oh my god, sarah…”

“call it your birthday present,” she says, hugging him. she smells like cigarettes and clean laundry and brendon wishes he could make a perfume out of her scent, call it _the day i truly lived._ he’d smell it when he’s sentimental, when he’s sad, when he’s happy, and it would make everything better because to him, this is the first day of brendon urie’s life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is so pretentious and i don't know if anyone likes it but if you do then thank you


	3. as luck would have it, i'm on the planet, and so it seems are you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> brendon meets ryan & cheesiness ensues

it’s not until brendon’s bags are packed, ready to travel the world, that he has second thoughts. he looks at sarah with big eyes. “should i really do this?”

her smile isn’t sweet like his sister’s, but it’s sincere. “your life calls for you from paris, brendon,” she says. “think of all the memories waiting there. think of all the sunsets you’ll see, the people you’ll meet, some of which you might fall in love with. don’t you want to go?”

he bites his lip. he’s wanted this his entire life. why not make his dreams a reality?

“okay.” and he hugs sarah for the last time, kisses her on the cheek. then he’s out the door, heading to the taxi. his map sits inside of his backpack, ready to see the world with him.

one day, he’ll settle down. one day, he’ll have a full-time job and a lover and clients waiting for him and all the things his parents dreamed of. but right now, all he has are some bags and a handful of tickets, and the only thing waiting for him is the world.

 

/

brendon arrives in paris, jet-lagged and ready to collapse. he stumbles into a hotel, using his very limited knowledge of french to get a room. the hotel’s cheap and not that nice and even though the bed reeks, he falls into it like it’s a pile of down feathers.

at ten in the morning, he wakes up. the room is dark but he blearily lets the sunlight in through the window. it floods the room like a flame to gasoline while brendon leans on the window sill. as he looks out over paris, he wonders what he’s done. what he’s going to face when he goes back home.

 _if_ he goes back home.

/

his phone doesn’t work, but he can imagine that his parents have been calling him nonstop. maybe they sent a letter, maybe they sent a package, maybe they themselves showed up at his door to knock some sense into him. he smiles as he thinks of their reactions to realising that their son ran away to france.

he’s sitting in a small café, sipping a cup of coffee. he has a couple maps in front of him that he bought at a tourist shop, and is busy circling the places he wants to go with an old pencil.

“puis-je vous être utile d’une quelque autre façon, monsieur?”

brendon looks up, surprised. a tall boy stands in front of him. “um, i’m sorry?”

“ah, pardon… is there anything more i can help you with, sir?”

“um, no, i think the coffee’s just fine.” brendon smiles.

the boy nods, going back to the counter. brendon is sitting on a terrace outside, soaking in the sunlight. he can see the eiffel tower in the distance and reaches his hand out slightly, like he can touch it from here.

he notices the waiter looking at him from the counter. he’s staring at him with soft, brown eyes, squinted like he’s thinking about something. brendon stands up, moving inside and over to him.

they stare at each other for awhile, before brendon finally says, “hi.”

the boy’s lips quirk up. “hello.”

“were you looking at me?”

“perhaps.”

the boy has a french accent, and it flows smoothly through his lips. brendon looks at his delicate face and bites his lip. he looks like some sort of angel one would find in the louvre, with pale skin and wide eyes.

“what is your name?” the boy asks.

“brendon.” he scratches the back of his neck. “what about you?”

“ryan.”

brendon scrunches his eyebrows. ryan isn’t a french name. he almost asks about it, but ryan asks him something else before he can.

“why are you here, brendon?”

he likes the way ryan says his name. “i… well, i’m running away.”

“from where?”

“home.”

ryan has long lashes like sarah, but they aren’t coated in mascara. his eyes crinkle and he asks, “why are you running away? home should not be a bad place to be.”

he shrugs. “home’s always been a sort of prison for me. leaving seemed like the obvious choice.”

ryan leans his chin on his hands, and brendon realises that his hair is a nice shade of brown. it glistens in the sunlight, like sweet honey dripping into a cup of tea. “but you are running away from your feelings. you will not get far, brendon.”

“maybe i won’t, but at least i can try.” he plays with his hands. “what’s your story, though? have you lived in paris your whole life?”

he smiles softly and runs a hand through his hair. “i am from a small village in eastern france called arbois, not here. the reason i left… well, my father… when i was at a very young age, he crawled into a whiskey bottle. he never got out, and it changed him for the worse. i could not deal with him any longer. i packed my bags and came to paris, which is, well, where i am now.”

brendon’s lip quirked up. “i guess i’m not the only one running away, huh?”

ryan’s laugh sounds like bells chiming in the distance. “no, i guess you are not.”

a shout comes from the back, and brendon can’t understand it but ryan can. he frowns. “i must be going. my manager needs me.”

/

“i met a boy today,” brendon says into the payphone, sighing. “he has caramel hair and soft lips and is so beautiful. like, he’s heaven-sent, sarah. i’m not even kidding.”

sarah laughs. “see? i knew traveling would be good for you. it’s only day one and you’re talking about love. when did you ever do that here?”

“you’re right.” he grins, even though she can’t see him. “thank you so much, honestly. it should be you out here experiencing all of this — i hardly deserve it.”

“but you do, you just don’t realise it.” with that, she hangs up, and brendon scratches the back of his head.

sarah is a mystery herself, but right now brendon has other things to think about. he places the payphone back in its original place and heads back to his hotel.

tomorrow, he’ll go back to ryan’s café and discover new things. right now, he’s tired.

/

he does go back to ryan’s café, and ends up going to a small garden with him on his lunch break. the flowers have just begun to bloom, like a kaleidoscope of nature.

“where would you say i _need_ to go here in paris?” brendon asks, staring at a rose bush where pinks and yellows blend into green like a sunset in a forest.

“the _tour eiffel_ ,” ryan says, “the louvre. notre dame de paris. arc de triomphe. sainte-chapelle. there are many places here worth seeing.”

“but where should i start?” brendon turns his head and looks to him.

ryan smiles. “tomorrow night, we will go to the _tour eiffel_. your adventure will begin there.”

/

the gods must be against him, because it’s pouring rain that night. brendon looks out the taxi window and watches as the eiffel tower glimmers in the distance, like a mirage in the desert.

he’s dropped off just outside the entrance, and can see ryan standing in line. he has a plaid umbrella and a trench coat, and grins when he sees brendon.

“i thought perhaps the rain had scared you off,” he says teasingly as they go up to the ticket booth.

brendon laughs, and ryan reaches out his hand. he accepts it carefully, looking at him with big eyes. he just smiles, dragging brendon over to the elevator.

they get to the top after awhile, and he hesitantly steps out. the floor is glass and reflects the rain like a huge lake, but ryan ignores it and pulls him over to the edge. 

“look,” he breathes.

brendon does look, in awe. the city is painted out in front of them, like a van gogh painting. the stars are barely visible through the clouds, but the twinkling lights of all the buildings make up for that. blues and purples smear together on the earth’s canvas, a piece of art like no other.

“i-it’s beautiful,” he says, and looks at ryan.

ryan looks at him with the universe mapped in his eyes. he bites his lip and brendon thinks of how soft they look. he leans in slightly and ryan meets him halfway.

with his hair matted and his skin damp, with his arms around ryan and his lips pressed to his, brendon wonders if this is what love is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay but this fic is so cheesy & badly written help me
> 
> (also ignore like the one sentence of french in this chapter it's probably wrong i took one month of french and dropped out)


End file.
